Demand growing for open access science texts and tools

About a year and a half ago, we reported on a Nature venture that was a bit far afield from its general focus on scientific publishing. Scitable aims to provide online, open access educational materials in the sciences. Anyone can browse the content or follow predefined courses, currently limited to the life sciences. But one thing that you won't generally spot is ads. Can a resource like this stay free indefinitely? It seems like a lot of scientific publishers are betting that it can, since a number of other free services have launched in the intervening time.

According to Scitable's Vikram Savkar, the answer is yes, although it's not there yet. Within the past year, the company has gotten some sponsors on board. Some of these are biotech and pharmaceutical companies, which are very focused on the current bioscience material (New England Biolabs, for example, has sponsored a series on the restriction enzymes they sell). Presumably, this roster will expand as Scitable grows into more subject areas. But a couple of existing sponsors—Intel and Tata Consultancy—are involved simply because they apparently think they're promoting a valuable resource.

Material in additional subject areas should start appearing within the next couple of years; for now, Savkar said, the focus will remain on expanding the content available in the biosciences. And it has expanded significantly since our first look in 2009. There are three main topic areas—genetics, cell biology, and ecology—and each of these has extensive topic pages. The list of topics covered within "Genetics and Society" alone is very impressive. Savkar said that the audience is growing faster than the material, with the traffic having doubled over the last 10 months, and that many educators are now incorporating individual pages into part of a larger course plan (which may or may not act as a supplement to traditional textbooks).

The big addition over the last year has been a mobile version of the site. Scitable made the strategic decision to focus on basic Web technologies rather than making a custom app for a smartphone. The reasoning behind this is that the people with the least access to this sort of material are students in the developing world, but those are the ones who are most likely to have Internet access via a very limited cell phone. The mobile site is designed so that content degrades gracefully if the hardware can't support things like video and lots of high-resolution images.

A proliferation of free

Scitable may have been a bit of a departure for Nature, but it has been followed by a number of other efforts that focus on providing free services, the rest directed at its core audience of scientists. Earlier this month, the company launched a free protocol exchange to enable researchers to exchange methods. And this week saw the introduction of a set of software tools for scientists.

And Nature isn't the only publisher that's rolling out free services. Springer has got its own set of tools, including a protocol exchange much like Nature's.

Elsevier appears to be a bit behind, but it's taking an approach that's a bit closer to Nature's Digital Science tools, in that it's creating an entire application platform. In Elsevier's case, third-party developers are allowed to contribute Web applications that the company will host, and it will provide secure access to its journals' content so that the apps can provide a specialized window on the scientific literature. Right now, the program appears to be in beta, but the company has announced that an image search function will be one of the first things offered.

Why are traditional publishers, some of which have had ambiguous views of open access publishing, suddenly rolling out free services? Some of it is obvious self-interest. By making their content easier to find and adding value to the experience of reading it, these services can increase the demand for the publishers' primary product: subscription journals. The services also act as a lure to get people browsing the publishers' sites in the first place.

But a lot of these services have no obvious connection to the underlying journal material, which suggests something a bit more strategic is afoot. Which could be the publishers recognizing that they may need to diversify away from the traditional journal model, which might not be sustainable.

17 Reader Comments

This is an amazing moment in science knowledge proliferation. I wonder how the weaker countries, universities, research centers will fare now that they will have access to such tools and texts. Arguably, having access to information and data is important, on par with high-cost equipment and high-class scientists.

<shameless self-promotion>I built an open-source on-line simulation building platform for some academic work. It lets you build differential equation based simulations and then share them with others.

It's built partly in response to the incredible poor documentation of models put forth in the academic press. Often a model is described in a paper, but key equations or the data for calibration are missing. As a result, what is nominally an open-source model, turns into a black box which can't be duplicated. This makes me sad

So I built Insight Maker (InsightMaker.com). It allows you to develop, run, share, collaborate on these simulation models all in your web browser. It's a work in progress, but my dream would be for papers to describe their model then include a link in their papers to something like Insight Maker where readers could explore the model, duplicate it, and then extend it.</shameless>

But a lot of these services have no obvious connection to the underlying journal material, which suggests something a bit more strategic is afoot. Which could be the publishers recognizing that they may need to diversify away from the traditional journal model, which might not be sustainable.

The publishers and their sponsors might also have a long-term goal of fostering a more science-literate public. The situation is pretty bad here in the US.

This article made me wonder if anyone's attempted an open textbook project using wikis, and so I stumbled on Wikibooks, hosted by the same Wikimedia foundation: http://en.wikibooks.org

It's an interesting project, although I wish they would evolve away from the anemic formatting template of Wikipedia and use a template that actually looks nice and engaging. And ideally, every textbook should have some sort of "download as PDF or ePub" tool so that a classroom can print the textbook without all the weblinks, or download to an ebook reader.

This is what the internet should be about. What it was meant to be about. It is also what each and every one of should fight to keep it about. Free access to knowledge, information and educational materials!

I had no idea that Scitable even existed, and as a high school biology teacher, I am thrilled to now know about it. Very cool.

CK12 is another pretty good (in my experience) open access education site. They have a pretty good amount of general primary and secondary level school material available for free. I've been able to make good use of their various science and math textbooks. Worth checking it out if you are a teacher, a parent looking the help supplement your child's education, or just an average joe (like me) wanting to brush up on some subject areas that you forgot long ago.

This is an interesting development, and I hope it will go further. The Nature Publishing group has, besides it's major brand "Nature", several other lower-level journals under the Nature brand. From my personal experience, this journals don't sell that well anymore. Several have quite good impact factors, but are also quite expensive. Under budget pressure, many libraries stopped buying those journals the last decade.I feel that every day, when I try to get an article my library stopped buying.I bet Nature Publishing group is finally feeling this budget pressure, and therefore is experimenting with new revenue channels. I hope other publishers will follow.

And for Elsevier, don't get me started. I wish those greedy robbers notice the tide to late and perish to the lower levels of hell. Although, I dread their hoard of gold lasts for another century ...

I'm thrilled to hear about this. Hopefully I can bone up on some of my weaker areas now For avocational naturalist, keeping abreast of new finds/data is cost prohibitive without stuff like this.thanks Ars!

"(New England Biolabs, for example, has sponsored a series on the restriction enzymes they sell)."

This is the part that will make or break the venture. This sort of conflict-of-interest is why subscription-based journals rather than advertising paid magazines were used for print based publication of unbiased peer-reviewed original material.

Though with "blank cheque" sponsorship from supporters like Intel, there is some hope that sponsorship is "blinded" and has no influence on editorial content.

"(New England Biolabs, for example, has sponsored a series on the restriction enzymes they sell)."

This is the part that will make or break the venture. This sort of conflict-of-interest is why subscription-based journals rather than advertising paid magazines were used for print based publication of unbiased peer-reviewed original material.

Though with "blank cheque" sponsorship from supporters like Intel, there is some hope that sponsorship is "blinded" and has no influence on editorial content.

Hmmm... Taking a brief look around for and at some of the articles on restriction enzymes, I'm not even seeing the name New England Biolabs mentioned (though, I must emphasize *brief*; I only skimmed, and didn't see anything obvious). Searching directly for "New England Biolabs" doesn't bring up anything. The only clear mention I see is on the Sponsors page, and that only contains a link to their website.

So, whatever the motives of that company, so far any content they have contributed seems to be without direct credit and gives no appearance of advertising. I'm still new to the site, but until there is any actual evidence of bias or conflict of interest, I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt.

It's exciting that demand is rising, but I doubt that we'll see this project continue its gratis status indefinitely.

That would be deeply sad. I would like to see some of the bigger open source communities (FSF, Apache, etc) get together with these guys and see what we can all do to keep such things up. Amazon can donate cloud space, can't it? Tata and Level 3 could get in there and donate some interconnect bandwidth. Apache and the FSF could rally some coders to get any custom programming done...there are so many possibilities.

There are very few things on the interblag that I think could really unite the various fractured interests of the Science and Technology community…but this is one. Only the most jaded ultra-right-wing uber-capitalists would be against this...and to be frank, there aren’t many of those folk in science and technology. We aren’t talking about something like Wikipedia here, where the argument can be (fairly easily) made that there is a lot of bias in what article selection, article presentation, source selection, “ownership” of articles, management, etc.

We’re talking about an online repository of primary source material and educational tools to promote science. The various science and technology industries wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for science education...and it will fail if we don’t continue to promote it. Call me [insult], but I believe it is not unreasonable to say that supporting causes exactly like this one are the moral and ethical responsibility of every single commercial science and technology entity in existence. They are also philosophically compatible with the large bulk of the open source community.

If the scientific and technological community drops the ball so utterly as to allow something like this project to fail then I think it speaks ill not only of the corporations that make their money off of science and technology...but of the very people who read magazines like Ars Technica. If something like this fails then it is only because of the apathy of people like us who quite honestly are the folks who should care the most.

So often while searching for algorithm information for my personal programming projects, I find abstracts describing papers that have *exactly* the information I need.

However, invariably, these are behind paywalls that demand $25-$500 PER PAPER. I know the original author doesn't see a dime of this. It's such a scam, such an insult, and such a disappointment. I've never received a dime for papers that I've published that are now behind paywalls. I doubt many do.

I can always open a VNC session through an SSH tunnel to my desktop at work; they pay ungodly sums for total access to most of this stuff. However, it would be dishonest to do so for my own private work. TBQH, the journals and publishers are taking terrible advantage of academia and it would be nice if they would vanish and be replaced by some sort of enhanced google docs like system supporting latex.

Elsevier in particular can not possibly go away soon enough. Anyone putting stuff on "free" or "open" Elsevier sites should realize that Elsevier is going to steal everything there, charge for it, and sue anyone with the temerity to object.